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My cell phone battery has slowly deteriorated into a state of decrepitude so pronounced that even I began to notice it. Obvious solution: buy a replacement. But then I got some junk mail from Verizon telling me that I had a $100 credit coming my way if I upgraded my phone. Hurrah! Why buy a new battery if I can get a whole new phone for free?

So I went to the Verizon store and picked one out. Not much different from my current phone, but it had a couple of handy new features. And since it retailed for $99.95, I’d get it for free! Except, there’s a problem:

I’m sorry, Mr. Drum, but you can’t get that phone.

Why not?

It’s only available if you’re on a nationwide plan.

But I am on a nationwide plan. I can call anywhere in the U.S. and Canada for one low monthly charge.

Sorry. I didn’t mean nationwide, I meant Nationwide™.

Oh. Well, can I switch to a Nationwide™ plan?

Yes, but not like the one you currently have. The cheapest Nationwide™ plan has more minutes than your current plan and costs $10 more per month.

So my free phone will actually cost me $240 over the life of the two-year contract?

Um, yeah. Pretty much.

And why can’t this new phone work on my existing plan?

Well, Verizon is really trying to get everyone to switch to the Nationwide™ plan.

Great. I actually went into the store steeling myself for the fact that my “free” phone wouldn’t actually be free. There’d be a “transfer charge” or some alleged government waste disposal fee — or something — and I’d end up paying twenty or thirty bucks for one reason or another. But $240? My cynicism wasn’t up to that.

So instead I got a cheap replacement phone. No new features, just a slightly different shape. A wee bit smaller and lighter. Plastic case instead of metal, so it’ll probably break before long. But it works on my current plan, so it’s really free.

Sort of. Actually, it cost me $50. Why? It took me a while to decipher what the clerk was telling me, but even though it’s a $79 phone (regular price, not any kind of special deal) and I had a $100 credit, I was required to pay $50 at the register and then send in my receipt to get a $50 mail-in rebate. So now I have to do that.

What’s really remarkable about all this is that I suspect most people don’t even complain about it. It’s just the way corporations treat us these days and complaining about it is useless. It’s not as if any other cell phone company would have treated me any better, after all. They make their money on people who buy high-minute plans and send lots of text messages and download tunes and upgrade to email and broadband. I don’t do any of that, so they don’t really care about my business. And why should they?

End of rant. But since every post is required to have a political point of some kind these days, here it is for this one: there was nothing unusual about my experience. Barely even anything to get upset about, really. So if you wonder why I’m not bothered by the idea of government-funded healthcare, that’s why. Frankly, my dealings with the government, on average, are better than most of my dealings with corporations. The government might sometimes provide poor customer service just because they lack the motivation to do better, but corporate America routinely provides crappy customer service as part of a deliberate and minutely planned strategy. I’ll take my chances with the feds.

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